Long, long ago, children, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the cutting edge of technology was the Betamax video recorder, we had to buy all that we wanted in shops. These were brick buildings of various sizes, selling a fixed number of things. If they didn't stock it, you couldn't have it. If we wanted something slightly different we had to rely not on infinite multitudes of products available to us via the internet, nor the cavalcade of suggestions each purchase therein now sparks off, but on serendipity. A chance discovery in a secondhand shop here, a cast-off from a family friend there and, very occasionally, presents from visitors from far flung lands such as America.

This last was the means by which I was vouchsafed my copy of The All-of-a-Kind Family. This is a collection of tales about a Jewish family - mother, father and five girls - growing up on the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the century. The book grew out of the stories that Taylor told to her (only) child at bedtime, about her own poor-but-happy childhood growing up as one of eight children of immigrant parents in the same area.

For me, the book was intoxicating - a window on to not just another time and place but another culture. The girls' trips to the library and market place, their summer day's escape from the broiling city to the seaside, their birthday celebrations are interspersed with sketches of Yom Kippur, Purim celebrations and Passover rituals. I loved it.

And yet, the book was full of moments that united reader and characters across the years, the oceans and the religions: Sarah's sudden, inexplicable bout of stubborn unwillingness to eat her rice soup one dinnertime; the importance of buying the right sweets with precious pocket money; the panic over a missing library book and having to confess the loss. From the Purim masquerades to the eldest girl Ella's nascent crush on family friend Charlie, every scene is vividly drawn and richly textured, written with love and without sentimentality.

The books are far better known and more popular in the US than they are here, and it wasn't until I went to New York in my old age that I realised that Taylor wrote several, almost equally delightful, sequels to the original and I brought them all back with me.

They are still not published here, I believe. But let us for once praise globalisation and the unacknowledged upside of creeping cultural homogenisation, for of course you do not have to rely on either a kindly friend or intercontinental flights to secure your set. We may have lost the Betamax, but we have Amazon, Alibris and Abebooks. Click and ye shall find.